Small shops and restaurants in my region lose customers every day for a simple reason: nobody answers WhatsApp fast enough. The owner is busy, the same questions repeat — prices, opening hours, location, "do you deliver?" — and by the time someone replies, the customer has moved on.
So I built a service around a simple idea: an AI assistant on the shop's WhatsApp number that answers instantly, 24/7 — and it runs on open-weight models, locally.
What it does
- Answers frequent questions (prices, hours, location, menu/services) in seconds
- Takes orders and notifies the owner immediately
- Runs on Gemma 3 via Ollama on a local machine — no per-message API cost, and customer data stays with the business
- Falls back to the owner when a question is outside what it knows
Why local open models?
Two reasons: cost and privacy. A cloud API bill grows with every conversation; a local model does not. And a small shop's customer chats never leave the shop's own hardware.
Packages
- Basic — $80: FAQ auto-replies + welcome message
- Advanced — $200: + order taking + instant owner alerts
- Pro — $500: + spreadsheet logging of orders + weekly reports
Links
- Service page: https://github.com/waleedshamhan2050-sys/AI-Post-Generator/blob/master/SERVICE.md
- Live site: https://whatsapp-automation-service-waleedshamhan2050-4299.vercel.app
This grew out of my earlier project, an AI post generator for WhatsApp and Telegram channels — the same stack (Python + Ollama + Gemma 3), aimed at a different job: not creating content, but answering customers.
If you run a small business and drown in repeated WhatsApp questions, I'd love your feedback: what are the five questions your customers ask the most?
Top comments (2)
Hey Waleed, I read your post about the WhatsApp service for small shops. I'm a solo founder too and stuck on the same problem with my own tool, so I'm curious: who's the one kind of person you'd most want using it right now?
Congrats on the launch. Running the assistant on local models so a shop's customer chats never leave its own hardware is a strong call for small shops. Free offer in return. Run your live site through the quick check at shipmark.co. The one thing we'd look at first is the signup and contact path on your service page, since a busy shop owner will give it one quick try on a phone and move on if it stalls. The worst finding shows up first.